Baseball/Talk

Is it really that popular in Australia? I'm live in Australia, and I almost never hear about it. We don't seem to have any major big-league competition, and I've never seen a baseball match on TV. (Of course, some people play it, but it isn't a very major sport.) So its popularity here is nothing like that in the US or Japan, if you could call it popular at all. -- [Simon J Kissane]

A lot of cricketers play it during the off-season. The various grips for throwing apparently help bowlers master slower deliveries and a variety of spin. I heard Richie Benaud talk about it at great length once.GWO

A number of Australians also play or have played in the North American major and minor leagues. (Dave Nilsson and Graeme Lloyd come to mind.) -- RjLesch

True, but it's still very much a minor sport, way behind the various football codes, netball, field hockey, swimming, and so on, in both participation and spectator numbers -- Robert Merkel

Rookie mistake, perhaps. Now it's Baseball/History. (However, the History section warrants its own page, I think.)

WRT the World Series, when I had a (mostly tongue-in-cheek) crack at American arrogance for naming their domestic sporting series "World Series" or "World Championships", it was claimed that the World Series baseball was so named because the first one was originally sponsored by the "World" newspaper. Is this correct? If so, it should probably be added to the Baseball/World Series page. --Robert Merkel

No, its an urban myth, probably started by an impromptu defense to the accusations above -- GWO

Agreed. "American arrogance" is a legitimate tag here. There's a classic photo of the Chicago White Stockings of the 1880s, posing before a banner that reads "Champions of the United States", but that was the exception. --RjLesch

The Baseball/Negro Leagues page, in my view, ought to retain the capital "L" in Leagues, since that's often how it appears in baseball literature. --RjLesch

Wasn't sure how to handle MVP and Rookie awards, since many sports have similarly-titled awards and wanted to avoid confusion. My thought is to do them as subpages (''Baseball/Most Valuable Player Award'', for example), but I know some folks don't like subpages. (The same confusion isn't there with Cy Young Award, since that's unique to baseball.) Thoughts? --RjLesch

Baseball is already subpage rich, and doesn't seem to be any the worse for it, so I like your present implementation. PS: Yankees Suck -- GWO